Episode 001 - "Building the Sand Castle: A New Direction for the Company"

Hi, I'm Alison Sand.

And I'm Adam Sand. And we've been building a business in Hawaii sporadically over the course of five years and luckily we've managed to move here full time and we're about to do a really big business launch and.

We have a baby on the way.

This is building a sandcastle. Maintain 200 so you get like a 10% variance for weather, seasonality.

I think that it's more detrimental to the business.

I have to go into this meeting in an hour, less than an hour cruise to manage working days per year and revenue. RBP is a business management consulting firm that uses tech enabled solutions to help roofing businesses grow and scale their companies. I like the entrepreneurial life because I need to have control over the environment. Every time I've had a job, I've looked at things and thought this could be done better. I just need to be able to take on the initiative and improve things because I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize things and find a way to make it more effective.

When you work with Adam sand, you have to be excited. You have to love what you do. Adam and I have this nasty habit of just creating businesses in our, in our home because we have nothing else to do. We just love working so much. The thing about Adam is like, people love to be around him because he's just a superhuman. He loves working. He works from the moment he gets up till the moment he goes back to sleep. And then he listens to podcasts while he's, you know, dreaming. We don't know if he's part robot or part alien or both, but there's something going on because I've never seen a human work as much as he does.

I became really entrepreneurial as a kid because my mom was that way. She was very entrepreneurial. She got that and fostered that in me at a very young age. I just always knew that that's what I wanted to do. I lost interest in school and, and I just focused on I want to start a business. And I just didn't know what I was going to do. And my first one was at 20 and it was tanning salons.

I love to work and I loved working before I met Adam, but I don't know what I would do if I had a 9 to 5. And Adam did what he did because Adam's unemployable. So he couldn't get a job because he would just tell everybody that they were running their business improperly. I think that there needs to Be a further discussion between what is going on in the operations department. There's a constant kind of is it s fault or is it fault? And so really what is happening here is the fact that isn't getting her work done and then coming with the excuse. I'll just say what it is an excuse at the bottom line is it's an excuse that is not allowing her to do her job and always either too busy, doesn't want to help or extremely difficult to deal with. He's detracting from that department and the organization.

So the situation with the, with the two teammates we have is we have one teammate who did a lot of remote training. That was his job. The real soldiering in this business for many years was the going on site was like leaving your family for three weeks or a month and walking into like 30, 40, 50 doe eyed people who look at you like you're there to change their entire career, what they do every day and their income. And you're supposed to make it better. And then when something breaks, you have to try and hold your composure and work through it while you're trying to demonstrate this new CRM to these people who don't know how to use it. And that's a super tough job and it's so hard to find somebody who could do it. And he, he did it. So I have to appreciate the person he is. But I also needed someone who is an expert in learning and development. So we had this amazing recruit that Alison found and her job is to extract from the learning and development and then turn that into something that's duplicatable in the company in a remote perspective. These two people have to now work with each other and the one is being very restrictive to the other and it means that we're not getting what the company needs as a result because they're both vying for position or trying to change the outcome to meet what they think is better for their career. And what expressed was that he's given her those jobs and she's allowed herself to fail whether by fault or not. And going into this big launch everybody has kind of been like what are we doing with this? What are we doing with that? And they've been very patient with me waiting while I've been doing this big plan, this big reveal issue and now I have to go in there with answers and I can't get the can down the road anymore. I have to go into this meeting in and out, less than an hour. I don't want to have a bunch of fragmented departments. We're supposed to be going to our all teams meeting in seven minutes, and then straight from that into this monthly meeting. I have this org chart to put together. I don't know.

I don't think you move it. I think that. I think, like as we said, that you would leave it as it is and you would explain that there can. There will still be shifts and changes as we. As we felt.

I have to have something.

It doesn't have to be 100%, Adam.

No, it doesn't have to be 100%. But the thing is, is that as it is, I can't show it as it is. I have to show up with something that defines that there will be customer success managers helping the revops team and helping this get run and has to run those customer success managers, but has to run the revops people. So team team up on success. Maybe one of them rises up to be a leader of. Leader of that department. So that's a yellow block or still wild cards. Everybody else that kind of have a place for.

And there really needs to be an expectation reset because what's going on in your personal life, regardless of what it is, can't. Can't be pushed onto the customer.

Yeah.

And the customer can't feel the backlash of a bunch of things happening, you know, day by day, week by week.

I agree. Okay. How is everybody? Are we excited for later?

Oh, yeah.

I'm in the scramble right now trying to do two things at once. I'm trying to be present in this meeting and also scramble to do something that has to be at the end of the next meeting to make sure it's ready. I'll go. So what this all teams meeting is, it's everybody getting clear on what our objectives are, what our issues are, what our wins are, and then ultimately taking away some notes as a team. And eventually the whole company will be here. Keep going. I'm going to let one of the dogs out just because he's going to keep barking until he gets let out. But you guys go ahead.

All right, so today, life of trying.

To take care of dogs. No. Stay out here. And he pissed everywhere. No sales today.

Previous month cash. I'm just gonna shut my door really quick. Previous month cash to date is $36,218.93. 50,425. 10. No sales today.

Trying to run a company with dogs from your home.

So the training next week.

Yeah. Yeah. The team absolutely crashed their pilot this.

Week and did Mr.

Anyone on the call?

I'm Going to count that as three days since last incident.

One of my employees is cutting back his hours severely, not going customer facing anymore. So therefore we had to come up with a solution for that.

I think the biggest issue here is the fact that we can't necessarily allow people to step out of the role that they were hired from because this is now the second time he's pushed.

Back on me so hard that he's telling me it's a non negotiable and he'll quit.

Yeah, I mean I want to do everything that I can, but at the same time we hired him for on site and that didn't pan out and then moved him over to where you are not panning out.

At the end of the day, we're going to see what we can do to salvage. But if he's just unilaterally deciding that, that he's going to decide when he works, what he does, what part of the role he does, if it's a non negotiable and he'll quit, like that's a decision, you know what I mean? Like that's an employee choice, you know what I mean? I identify with trying to be an understanding person. But we have told him that we are, that we are showing a new model and that he needed to stay strong. I've told him that no matter what anybody says to wait until this big reveal and see where you see yourself fitting.

Everything has been up in the air until today.

You guys will see in the next meeting what's going on. This is all just everybody is boiling to a point because it's like the minute you set a deadline for some big new thing, all the emotions are high. Emotions are high. I hope you can see that. When I've spent the last month kind of trying to put together a plan that would create stability for everybody, one person does not get to tear down my whole plan. And I would sooner cut off a leg to save the body of my plan. The big reveal is about moving down market to a different customer. Our previous customer was one where the marginal utility of more money in their bank account had a decreasing impact on their happiness. They didn't need another boat, another car. They just wanted their business to run the way they've always envisioned it. Our new customer is lower revenue amount. They need help getting past the first few breakpoints in their business. This is a simpler, deliverable, a lot more predictable and a lot easier for my team. What necessitated this change? First of all, I have a baby on the way. I can't Be the homeless HubSpot guy traveling around the country anymore. I live in Hawaii. It's very expensive to get across the ocean. And ultimately my team has to constantly expand their skill set when working with this high level of customer. And it's not a scalable business in that our income cannot go up without our expenses going up. The new format will allow us to have our income go up without scaling expenses because we are going to become tech enabled and focusing on one to many delivery. Because this is the start of something really big and I'm really excited to kind of share this with you guys. This is all about owning the journey going forward, right? Not the destination. So much about how we, how we've built our business and how our customers are, have been looking at business is through a destination, but now it's a lot more about the journey. Something we have to recognize is that for the last year we've lived something new that we haven't lived since 2008, which is that we don't have this constantly rising economy. We're kind of trying to create a big huge smash on the market and it's happening. So we're already getting pent up demand. People are in my inbox feeling like what's this thing? There's this conference coming up, should I be making a decision? And so the whole idea of building up tension and demand around this thing so that this offer kind of smashes the market with this like immediate amount of need so that people can get in on some like FOMO of some, maybe some, you know, first adopter discounts and then kind of use that as the capital injection of the company to take this whole new direction from a position of strength. So we're going to have our marketing initiatives founder lead magnets. We're going to a free sumo quote to CRM Automation. We have to get our course schedule up, free CRM build and the massive amount of work here. 50% of this entire thing is going to fall square on my head. The other 50% will fall on yours. And so anybody who's interested in understanding this, I will be available all weekend because Monday is when the work starts. Because that is what I have to do before this baby comes to make sure that we can go live with these lead magnets and offers by November 1st.

The meeting I think went really well. It was nice to see that the employees were goofy, that they were kind of excited and kind of playing around because a lot of times when you facilitate like a huge change where like departments are changing, core products are Changing the employees, sometimes they don't see themselves where they fit in. And so then the, the difficult part is that they feel like, well, am I losing my job? Am I getting demoted or am I getting promoted? And so to see Adam basically do two years of work in a month and a half and bring all of that information together is the most inspiring part. I don't think that it's going to be smooth at all. I think that, I think that it's going to be it a ton of work, a ton of problem solving and a ton of staffing and HR related issues. So I think that if you like work, it'll be fun, but it won't be smooth. There will be the. Some people will feel like it's really smooth, but most people are going to feel like it's a lot of work.

The reason that scaling a business is important is because business is hard. You've sacrificed a ton to build it. And a lot of what I've done is only worth it if this becomes something that I can look back and be proud of. Going into this big reveal, I'd done so much preparation. It was 60 days of like just writing with a crayon on my iPad, researching, learning, interviewing people, staring at the wall and just figuring it out and going into it. I was nervous because I'm trying to condense 60 days, 10, 12, 16, even 20 hour days. I'm trying to condense that into 60 slides and communicate it to a team. And I was so worried about how they might receive it from a career perspective or just a belief in my vision perspective, it actually went really well. A few people had concerns about the org chart and where they fit. And so the one thing that kind of came out of it was people were just unsure where they fit on the org chart. And if now that we were creating something predictable and scalable, if that meant that they were going to get pigeonholed into certain positions. So I actually had to create a whole org chart projecting five years into the future future to show them all the other roles that would exist in the company. When we're a $61 million company, not a five million dollar company.

I think just the absolute love of work keeps me going. I love seeing the results of making that really good hire of implementing something into a business process. Procedures, systems, automations.

We want our people to succeed because we believe that the reason a company exists, right, is to take care of the courageous founders who started it, who slept on floors and ate shit for years to get it to where it is. Comma, and be a place where the employees who contribute back to that organization can achieve their personal, professional goals at a rate that excites them. It.